Armageddon Science: The Science of Mass Destruction

Armageddon Science: The Science of Mass Destruction

Brian Clegg

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 1250016495

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

An exploration of the terrifying threats to our world that fill today's headlines: from global warming epidemic to the threat of nuclear weapons and the risk posed by the leading edge devices like the Large Hadron Collider. Armageddon Science by Brian Clegg is everything you want to know about potential man-made disaster.

Climate change. Nuclear devastation. Bio-hazards. The Large Hadron Collider. What do these things have in common? They all have the potential to end our world. Every great scientific creation of man is balanced by an equal amount of danger―as there's no progress without risk. Armageddon Science is an authoritative look at the real "mad science" at work today, that recklessly puts life on Earth at risk for the pursuit of knowledge and personal gain. This book explores the reality of the dangers that science poses to the human race, from the classic fear of nuclear destruction to the latest possibilities for annihilation. Combining the science behind those threats with an understanding of the real people responsible as well as providing an assessment of the likelihood of the end of the world, this isn't a disaster movie, it's Armageddon Science.

evidence to governments around the world. At this meeting, Senator Boxer was given an unequivocal message that climate change was real, and there was a very high probability that the burning of fossil fuels was a major contributor to the problem. As she left the meeting, one of Senator Boxer’s staff pulled her to one side. She was told that a conservative organization, funded by an oil company, was offering scientists $10,000 to write articles that attacked the IPCC report and the models that had

unusable. When the British army tested anthrax as a weapon on Gruinard Island off Scotland in 1942 (it was never deployed in battle), it took nearly fifty years before the island was safely decontaminated. There are many other possibilities for a biological weapon, ranging from diseases like Ebola fever to the incredibly deadly natural toxin ricin, which is derived from the castor bean plant. Ricin is particularly scary because the lethal dose is so small—about half the size of a grain of

different from a conventional source of light. Because of the way they were stimulated, the light waves moved together, synchronized in their phase. It was the mechanism behind the device, amplifying the initial weak source of microwave photons, that led to its being described as microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation—a “maser” for short. By 1960, the American Theodore Harold Maiman had developed an equivalent device that worked with visible light. The concept had been

Brahic, “Solar Shield Could Be a Quick Fix for Global Warming,” New Scientist, June 5, 2007. The Russian proposal to release 600,000 tons of sulfur into the atmosphere is described in Catherine Brahic, “Earth’s Plan B,” New Scientist, February 28, 2009. Chapter 5 Extreme Biohazard Information on the 2009 swine flu pandemic from the BBC News Web site, http://news.bbc.co.uk. The potential lethality of anthrax is taken from “an official American study” quoted in Frank Barnaby, How to Build a